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Google AI Snatches Go Victory from Facebook

Google's AlphaGo AI has officially beaten the Go Grand Master Lee Sedol 4-1 as of today. This is an amazing achievement for Google as they're the first company to build an AI who is so successful at Go. Even Mark Zuckerberg himself congratulated Google DeepMind on this achievement, but not everyone at Facebook is being so positive and considering Facebook and Google's past with AI, this is no surprise.

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Yann LeCun is the head of AI research at Facebook and he has been rather critical of Google's success. It is somewhat understandable, the two companies are in competition with their artificial intelligence and Google is proving to be miles ahead of Facebook. LeCunn has essentially been saying that AlphaGo's victory doesn't count, due to the fact the AI had training, rather than just figuring it out through reinforced learning.

He has been claiming that AlphaGo isn't true artificial intelligence, even if the media hype seems to be suggesting that they're close. All of these comments and sharing of articles that are supposedly proving his points just make him look like he's having a tantrum. It's kind of sad because if he'd have waited, if he'd built up evidence as to how the Facebook AI was the better, then it would be easier to believe him. Instead it just looks like that he's screaming that his AI is better than Google's. The fact is that LeCun could have a point; he just has yet to actually prove it.

The successor of AlphaGo should be called BettaGo (haha!) and include online adaptation to the opponent.During her PhD...
Posted by Yann LeCun on Sunday, 13 March 2016

Even with LeCun being unimpressed, you have to admit that Google DeepMind actually have achieved something. No matter how the AI learned the moves, it still won a complicated game four times in a row and only lost to the human player once. Both Facebook and Google wanted to reach this achievement first for a reason, and now Google has done it.It suggests that AI can in fact make informed decisions following a complicated set of rules without too much difficulty and this is a big step towards true AI. If Facebook want their AI to be shown to be better , then it had better beat Lee Sedol 5-0 and have each game last a shorter amount of time. Otherwise it's just not that impressive.

Of course, we have yet to see LeCun's reaction to this fourth and final victory, perhaps he'll be happy to read the news; or perhaps he'll continue to try and prove Google wrong. It'll be interesting to see how Google react to him, whether they have any evidence to dispute his theories of them being wrong or whether they'll simply just ignore them.

I think we can safely say that the Facebook-Google feud is still going strong, unfortunately.

Rosina is a Songbird rookie with a degree in Creative Writing. She's trying to focus on her novel on the side but is hoping that Content Writing will turn out to be a good career choice in the mean time! Follow her @Songbird_Rosina

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